The Obama Administration continues to defy the will of the American people who strongly supported the bipartisan decision of Congress in 2008 to lift the moratorium on offshore drilling not just off the East Coast and in the Gulf of Mexico, but off the Pacific Coast and Alaskan shores as well.

Does Boehner seriously think there’s anyone up in arms that Obama only lifted the moratorium in the east? Not even the Tea Partiers have enough rage on their hands to dump it into this. For all this talk about the “will of the American people,” my guess is that there’s not much will to spread around one way or the other.

Not that this is going to stop the GOP from abusing that already-exhausted rhetorical trope at every available opportunity.

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It looks like a handful of Senate Republicans have dropped this whole “poisoning the well” nonsense, although it’s hard to say for how long. My read on Lindsay Graham in particular is he likes being in the press to talk about how he’s working on bipartisan compromises infinitely more than he likes actually crafting and passing potentially controversial legislation. Especially since doing the latter requires keeping the entire Democratic caucus together while also rounding up a couple votes from his own caucus, which is hard and ugly work.

But who knows, really? Maybe a couple of Republican Senators will surprise us. Scott Brown voted for the jobs bill, after all; although, needless to say, there aren’t many other members of the increasingly regional party who have to worry about a constituency as liberal as his.

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No blogging through Monday, as I’m spending the weekend guesting over at Spencer Ackerman’s blog along with friends Dara, Matt, and a mysterious, pseudonymous informant who I’ll just refer to as Deep Throat. We started Saturday, so there’s already a fair number of posts up.

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The typically great Brian Beutler has a typically great piece over at TPMDC regarding the GOP’s insistence that the Democrats “poisoned the well” on the Hill by ramming through passing HCR. The result of the contaminated water supply: Congressional Republicans, who were apparently just about getting ready to quit the blind obstructionism and get back to actually legislation, are now so incensed that they’re going to stay the course.

But I think Beutler missed a critical opportunity when he spoke to Lindsay Graham–who, like the other Republicans quoted in the piece, blames Democrats for creating a bad atmosphere but doesn’t specify which formerly cooperative Republicans are now going to hew to the party line.

That is, of course, because he’s referring to himself. Graham wants to keep things in the passive tense because it gives him an excuse to stop making pro-immigration reform noises that could be potentially upsetting to the party base. But of course if he wants to trash reform, he should be up front about it. I’d like to see some enterprising journalist ask him straight up whether or not he would still vote for it.

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To be clear, I don’t think it’s even entirely coherent to talk about liberalism versus conservatism as the fundamental political/philosophy conflict in the United States anymore. What I call mainstream American political conservatism is really just incoherent, violent rage. And the nominal liberalism of the Democratic Party under Barack Obama is so measured, heavily qualified and internally diverse (spanning the ideological spectrum from Dennis Kucinich to Bart Stupak) that it can barely be called liberalism at all.

The real split in this country now is between people (left or right) who are actually concerned with solving problems and people (left or right, Code Pink or Tea Party) who just feel like blindly emoting.

Although, of course, blindly emoting without resorting to violence, vandalism and death threats is obviously vastly preferable to what we’re currently seeing from the Tea Party fringes.